Saturday, July 2, 2011

Review: Ruby Red

This book counts towards the Debut challenge.




Gwyneth is one of the normal members of the family.  The time-travelling gene skipped her and landed on Charlotte instead.  Not that Gwen really minds; she's fine having a normal life and watching movies and doing other normal things with her best friend Lesley, instead of taking riding and fencing lessons like Charlotte.

But when Gwen involuntarily time-travels on her sixteenth birthday, her entire eccentric family is startled and horrified to find that Gwen is the Ruby, the twelfth time-traveller.  Too bad Gwen was never trained for any of it, and is totally unprepared to deal with time traveling...

Entertainment:  

It was an interesting premise, but it didn't hold my interest all that well.  In the end I finished it having liked it but not loved it.  I suppose what I didn't like about it was that it was so bland - definitely a vanilla-flavored book, not particularly memorable at all.  Which is too bad, given the great premise.  So, in the end, I felt neutral about it.

Plot:  

Although I predicted the twist of the ending, it was a unique and entertaining plot.  The time-travel element seemed fairly well-thought out and plausible.  I only wish that a few more questions had been answered in this first book - there's quite a lot of plot threads left dangling until the sequel.

Characters:  

Gwen was alright, albeit a little bland.  Really, none of the characters stood out as particularly good or bad to me.

Writing:  

Fairly well-written, although at times the vocabulary and sentence structure and such seemed kind of immature.  But given that the narrator was sixteen, I guess that makes sense.  So, it was fairly well-written.

End Result: three stars.  A decent book, but not amazingly excellent.

1 comment:

  1. I got the same impression, and I only got through the first couple chapters :( I want to give it the benifit of the doubt - maybe the translation from another language didn't do it justice - but it's still not one I'd recommend in the English version.

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